Road Surface Temperature Validation of the Global Weather Corp. Road Weather Forecasts

Global Weather Corp (GWC) produces high spatial and temporal resolution road weather forecasts (referred to by the product name RoadWX), across North America, Europe, and Asia. The RoadWX forecasts combine GWC’s industry leading atmospheric forecasts with our road physics models to compute road surface temperature and road state, which represent critical information for road maintenance, vehicle safety, and navigation applications.

GWC continually assesses available ground truth sources for verification and validation of all aspects of the RoadWX forecasts. Road surface temperature is one of the more direct validations possible due to the availability of Road Weather Information System (RWIS) sites throughout the United States and Europe. It is also one of the most important characteristics of roads to predict correctly given the subsequent impact to precipitation falling on roads. GWC has collected road surface temperature data for around 1700 RWIS stations in the US and 700 RWIS stations in Europe for over a year to perform comparisons with the RoadWX analyses and forecasts. GWC will present results of this validation which will include breaking down data by temperature range, geographic location, season, etc. Some of the challenges of using RWIS data as a ground truth data source will be presented as well. Primary goals of this study are to quantify the accuracy of road surface temperature forecasts to subsequently improve road surface condition forecasts which are critical for future technologies such as connected and autonomous vehicles.